Property auctions can help you buy a house at a low price, with minimum fuss

The painfully-slow business of house buying can be avoided by the increasingly popular route of snapping up a home at an auction - but the process is not for the faint-hearted.

The upsides are that the process can take a month or less, you can see rival purchasers and know what they will pay. The downsides are that auctions can attract ‘problem’ homes which, say, need renovation, have sitting tenants or are hard-to-sell like flats above shops.

But auctions frequently allow canny buyers to pay lower-than-average prices so long as they do their research and stay calm in the pressure of the bidding room.